


What Comes After Tea

by spacestationtrustfund



Series: Letyat zhuravli [8]
Category: Black Widow (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Diaspora, F/M, Families of Choice, Identity, Natasha's early days with SHIELD, Recovery, Tea, Trauma, feelings are complicated
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-22
Updated: 2019-11-22
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:48:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21526261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacestationtrustfund/pseuds/spacestationtrustfund
Summary: Natasha drinks her tea as bitter as possible, even after she comes in from the cold.
Relationships: Clint Barton/Natasha Romanoff, Isaiah Ross & Natasha Romanoff, Maria Hill & Natasha Romanoff
Series: Letyat zhuravli [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/286848
Comments: 42
Kudos: 422





	What Comes After Tea

**Author's Note:**

> “What comes after tea (что после чаю следует)?” is a joke originating in pre-revolutionary Russia, with the answer or punchline being, “the dead will rise.”

Sign your name. Become a series of signals.

[Sun Yung Shin](https://poets.org/poem/history-domestication)

//

Part of Natasha’s deconditioning training involves familiarizing her with the many intricacies of American customs.

Maria primarily handles pop culture. Maria mostly tells her about popular books, music, movies, and clothes. Maria takes Natasha to the public library and leads her to the children’s section. “Pick three,” Maria says, brandishing a DC library card like it’s a weapon. Natasha lets Maria know, in no uncertain terms, exactly how sceptical she feels about the whole exercise, but they end up spending almost six hours in the library that day, and choosing only three books to check out at the end of the day makes her furious. She finally settles on a science book about bats, a picture book about a boy and his pet dog, and a rhyme book about a dinosaur that wanted to be an actor.

It’s weird. It’s uncomfortable. But she can deal with it if she has to, of course. If SHIELD wants her to go to the library and read kids’ books, then she’ll go to the library and read kids’ books. Of course she can deal with it if she has to.

Besides, the books are interesting. She likes the pictures.

When Natasha meets her other handler (except she isn’t supposed to think about the agents like handlers; they’re called _supervisors_ now, apparently), Isaiah, she expects something similar. “Are we going to the library?” she asks. Maria made her return the books when the two weeks were up, and Natasha wants more.

But instead, Isaiah makes her talk about feelings. They have three two-hour sessions a week and Natasha hates every second. Isaiah sits her down and goes over the rituals of human interaction and socialization like Natasha is five years old.

“I don’t want a therapist,” Natasha tells him bluntly, on the first day.

“Well, then you’ll be glad to know that I’m not a therapist,” says Isaiah. “I’m a counselor.”

Natasha does not tell him, _I don’t want a counselor either_ , no matter how much she wants to. SHIELD isn’t going to want to keep her if she’s childish. That’s why they’re giving her children’s books to read: they’re testing how developed her skills are. No one needs an agent who doesn’t know what she’s doing.

She has to prove she isn't a child. That's something she can do. It doesn't mean she has to enjoy it, though.

Usually, Isaiah tells her an example of a situation, and makes Natasha tell him how she thinks a person should respond to it.

“This is exactly like what the Red Room would have made me do,” Natasha informs him, mutinous.

Isaiah doesn’t seem bothered, which is a step up from how most of the SHIELD agents tend to respond when Natasha references the Red Room so flippantly. Instead, Isaiah merely adjusts his stupid little reading glasses, clears his throat, and reads her an example of a situation where a boy drops his ice cream cone.

//

“Everyone treats me like I don’t understand feelings,” Natasha complains, when Clint comes to pick her up. SHIELD has reluctantly agreed to allow her to live in Clint’s apartment in New York, but she isn’t allowed to go anywhere by herself until her probationary period is over.

Clint doesn’t seem to mind, either the non-sequitur or her continued intrusion into his life.

“Feelings are dumb,” he agrees, leading her towards the subway. “It doesn’t matter how you feel about something, what matters is how you respond to it.”

//

Clint’s form of human interaction therapy is going out to eat. He takes Natasha to a different restaurant after each not-therapy session and lets her pick whatever she thinks would be interesting to try.

New York apparently has endless ethnic restaurants, Natasha decides.

It takes almost two months before they go to a Russian-style restaurant. No one in SHIELD speaks Russian, or Ukrainian, or Kazakh, or Bulgarian, or Armenian. No one in SHIELD can provide her with that sort of familiarity.

The woman behind the counter is called Yelizaveta, and she has two children who she thinks are Natasha’s age, and she talks to Natasha about emigrating in 1989. “Of course, you’re too young to remember what things used to be like, before the wall fell,” Yelizaveta says, shaking her head as she serves them their lenivye golubtsy, and Natasha, whose official SHIELD-approved cover is that she fled Ukraine after the Orange Revolution, smiles and agrees and doesn’t tell the truth.

//

After six months of living in Clint’s apartment and grudgingly allowing herself to be taken to American culture lessons and human interaction lessons and comfort food lessons, Natasha drags Clint to the grocery store and loads as many pounds of green and black tea as she can carry into a basket.

“What are you doing?” asks Clint, alarmed.

Natasha gives him a look. “I’m buying tea,” she says, slowly. “Why? Did SHIELD not give me enough money to buy things?”

“What? No! I mean, yes. I mean, of course you have enough money to buy... seventeen pounds of tea, if that’s what you want—”

“Okay,” she says. “Do you think this store would sell Wissotzky?”

“No, you can just— _Nat_ ,” Clint says. He carefully divests her of the pound bags of tea, telegraphing his movements, and grabs a much smaller box off a nearby shelf and holds it out to her. “You don’t have to buy that much. You can just... look, that’s what these smaller boxes are for, okay? That way, if you don’t like the flavor of tea you picked out, you can try a different one next time.”

“Like the restaurants,” Natasha says. She looks down at the little box in Clint’s hand.

“Right! Well, sort of.” Clint scrunches up his face. It makes him look like a confused puppy. “Here, try this kind,” he says. He proffers the smaller box again.

Natasha takes it. The box is blue and gray and apparently contains 32 tiny sachets. Postman’s tea, she thinks. She considers it for a moment. “Okay,” she says.

Clint boggles at her. “I didn’t mean _literally_ buy the Earl Gray—I mean, you can buy it if you want, of course, but—”

“Okay,” Natasha says, cheerily, and puts the little box in her basket.

//

Natasha drinks her tea as bitter as possible, even after she comes in from the cold. She tears open the little paper packet with precise fingers, then dunks the bag into her mug, swirling the contents around and around until the water cools from boiling to hot but bearable. She lets the tea steep until it’s so bitter it makes her mouth hurt and leaves an aftertaste long after she’s swallowed it all.

“You know, you don’t have to punish yourself anymore,” Clint says.

“I’m not punishing myself. I like it,” Natasha tells him.

Clint doesn’t believe her when she says that, of course, but that doesn’t really matter. It’s not like he knows about how she and Yelena used to savor the rare times they got to drink kisel on missions, the sweet taste of the fruit. She tried to drink tea mixed with honey (Western sweetener, really!) only once after leaving Russia, and the syrupy cloying taste was too much. She’d gagged and barely avoided vomiting, then. The sweet taste is inextricably linked with being sent out on missions.

And besides, she thinks. Clint has no right to critique her choice in beverages. _He_ drinks coffee that’s been sat in the pot for so long that it’s nearly congealed. So he doesn’t really have a leg to stand on in that argument.

//

When she was in the Red Room, Natasha learned how to prepare tea the proper Russian way. The Direktrisa had an expensive Gzhel samovar sat on the desk in her offices in the Ukrainian headquarters, of course, but the girls weren’t allowed to touch it. If the Direktrisa wanted them to drink tea, she would brew it for them. Sometimes, if she were in a particularly good mood, she would let Natasha keep the little sachet of Wissotzky, to hold in her palm like a secret. Natasha would put it in her mouth and suck on it, until the bitter flavor was all gone.

But in the summertime, when the girls would get to go out with Kseniya to the dacha in the countryside, there was an old silver samovar in the kitchen, and there the girls were allowed to use the samovar, to help Kseniya with her cooking. When Natasha was small, she used to love going through the wooden boxes of zavarka, smelling each one before selecting one to brew and steep with the correct amount of kipyatok.

//

Maria usually takes her out for drinks as part of the human interaction program, but Maria isn’t drinking alcohol while she recovers from a GSW that went into her lower intestine and would have killed her if not for the quick reactions of the field medic team. Maria orders a sweet tea, grudgingly, and Natasha orders a wild cherry Stolichnaya, because she likes the way it burns her mouth.

“We could have just stayed in,” Maria groans, when she sees Natasha’s order. “I know you still have a bottle of that stuff in the freezer at Barton’s place.”

Natasha hums. “Too bad someone made us go out and observe how normal people interact when they’re at a bar.”

“Too bad,” Maria echoes, darkly. She raises her eyebrows questioningly at Natasha. “You want to try some of this stuff?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever had any,” Natasha says. She tacks on, “In the Red Room, they never let us drink anything sweet. We had to drink chifir and Stoli with every meal.”

“Uh huh,” says Maria. “And you ate boiled potatoes and black bread and gruel for the one meal a day, right?”

“Only if we were lucky,” Natasha says. She managed to fool several of her SHIELD supervisors and almost all of the junior agents assigned as her backup slash surveillance detail with that story, which resulted in an outpouring of concern from Coulson’s team and an outpouring of resigned frustration from Fury, while Clint had mostly found the whole thing hilarious. She says, “Most days, we didn’t get anything to eat at all.”

She tries the sweet tea. It makes her teeth hurt and her throat close up from the sweetness of the sugar, but the ice cubes are satisfyingly crunchy. It reminds her of the sbiten Zvezde used to get, sent in packages from her family in Leningrad.

Maria slouches on her elbows, watching a trickle of condensation run down the outside of her glass. “You know you can tell the truth about what things were like in Russia,” she says. “No one is going to judge you for being brainwashed. We all know what Stockholm syndrome is.”

Natasha snorts. “Mälardrottningen,” she says.

But of course Maria doesn’t know Swedish. Maria doesn’t know Russian, either. Maybe that’s why Natasha likes her. And Natasha doesn’t dislike Maria’s sweet tea, even if it is a bit too strong for her tastes, and it makes her feel like vomiting until the knots in her stomach are all gone. It’s just that she just doesn’t think sweet beverages are as interesting as bitter ones.

//

Clint only tries to drink the tea Natasha makes once. He takes a sip, pulls a face, and sets down the mug. “Eugh,” he says. “What did you put in this, Bitrex?”

In reality, Natasha is just drinking chifir, because it reminds her of home. She’s been savoring her mug for almost half an hour by now. She remembers once, when Masha drank an entire cup as fast as possible, because she couldn’t stand the bitter taste, and threw up. It’s funny, Natasha decides. Masha couldn’t stand the bitterness of chifir, and now she can’t stand the sweetness.

But of course Natasha likes the bitter taste.

It reminds her of home.

She curls her fingers around the mug and smiles. “I like it,” she says.

//

“I picked up some more pods for the Keurig when I was shopping,” Natasha says, instead of knocking on the door or announcing her presence.

She can tell Clint makes a face, even though she can't see him. “I hate that thing,” he says. “It’s evil.”

“It’s not evil just because you don’t understand how to use it,” Natasha says. She sets the groceries down on the counter, and pats the Keurig consolingly on its lid. “Ignore him, he’s just projecting his insecurities onto inanimate objects again.”

“I know you’re talking to the robot,” Clint hollers from the next room.

He’s probably still curled up on the couch the way he was when she left, underneath the warm weight of multiple blankets and Lucky, even though the brownstone’s thermostat (which is mercifully working, for once) is turned almost all the way up. The control box is right next to the kitchen light switch; Natasha turns it off on reflex, then reconsiders and turns it back on, but on a much lower setting.

Now she can almost hear Clint’s exasperation in her head. Natasha rolls her eyes. She puts the milk and eggs in the fridge, next to the several half-emptied Tupperware containers containing the horrendous goulash Natasha had attempted to make the last time she’d stayed over at the apartment.

Clint’s voice drifts into the kitchen again. “Aw, it’s freezing, Nat, did the heat go out again?”

“I can check,” Natasha says. She puts a bag of potatoes down on the counter, then frowns down at it. “You should get a lazy susan,” she says.

“A whuh?”

“One of those things you can put plates on,” Natasha says. “It spins around.”

“Hey, that sounds cool! We should get one of those!”

Natasha smiles even though no one can actually see her.

“Hey,” Clint says. “Did you buy marshmallows?”

“Why would I buy marshmallows?”

“So we would make hot chocolate,” Clint offers.

Natasha hums. “No,” she says.

Clint doesn’t seem that bothered. “Hey, come in here,” he calls out. “It’s super cold—hey, c’mon, all the blankets are in here.”

Oh. Natasha hesitates, staring at the small pile of dry groceries still sat out on the counter.

Maybe she shouldn’t have turned down the heat. If she actually thinks about it, she doesn’t know why she would have done that. She’s wearing one of Clint’s over-sized sweatshirts, the grey one with a purple target on it, but she’s still a little bit chilly.

“There’s a box of that weird Earl Gray you like on the shelf over the sink,” says Clint.

Natasha opens the cabinet. Sure enough, the small box is sitting there. She takes it down and cradles it against her chest for a moment.

She hadn’t brought any tea over to Clint’s apartment since the first grocery shopping trip all those months ago. He must have gone out and bought it himself.

“Nat?”

It _is_ cold, with the heat still turned down. Still hugging the paper box, Natasha pads into the living room.

Clint furrows his eyebrows at her from underneath his makeshift fortress. There’s a grubby bandage on the right side of his jaw. Lucky, on his lap, wags his soft plumy tail furiously when he sees her standing in the doorway. Clint says, “Are you going to make the tea, or just hold it?”

“Move your legs,” Natasha says, tilting her head towards the couch, and Clint’s entire face lights up like the warmth from the heater has been concentrated in one spot.

They sit on the couch and watch the latest episode of Dog Cops with the subtitles on, because Clint doesn’t have his hearing aids in and Natasha appreciates being able to turn off her brain enough that the English words don’t always make sense when she hears them, and Natasha holds the little paper box of Earl Gray in her lap the entire time.

**Author's Note:**

> Tea that comes in the little bags is called postman’s tea because it comes in “envelopes.” You can read a good introduction and summary of Russian tea culture [here](https://www.streetdirectory.com/food_editorials/beverages/teas/russian_tea.html).


End file.
